Banks, finance and what could be.

The people of Costa Rica believe small is beautiful since they have retained their banks over tremendous outside pressure. In contrast one of the UK’s mutual banks, the Co-operative has fallen prey to the voracious appetite of the banking world of hedge funds and those who have the power to do what they want with available wealth, whoever it belongs to. Labour sadly joined Tories and friends in attempting to make this a large corporate organisation. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em I suppose is the philosophy.

The transition of the UK amongst others of changing from an industrial base, which produced tangible wealth to the country, to the paper-based finance dominated economy, began years back. My Father set up his own business manufacturing and selling equipment for use on farms and industrial sites. One day the Distillers Company took charge and it was an accountant who made decisions about the company’s future. What he knew about industry I don’t know, but it didn’t seem to matter. From then on it didn’t have a future.

The practice of accountants running things has snowballed as large off-shore corporations take charge of our lucrative public services running councils, schools, health services, prisons and security. With them it doesn’t seem to matter how well they do or don’t perform, they are the Untouchable.

I seem to remember that as the established accountancy firms began to take control Capita came into prominence, I thought with Labour’ support at the time. If the Tories could do it they should get in on the act and compete. Of course Capita is now huge and undistinguishable from any other corporation. It dominates Birmingham City Council and is adept at getting its fingers into every pie at a huge cost to us as tax payers. Two Capita stories were prominent in yesterday’s news. The first in the Birmingham Post reported on the massive charges Capita were making for providing a website for the New Birmingham Public Library. As the libraries await a decision on a sell off we find our money going into someone else’s pocket. Capita were in the news previously for the delays and incompetence in setting up the Council’s website.

The second Capita story is about one of their executives pronouncing the need for bigger and better wars, the lack of which he opined had led to the demise of large sections of Britain’s armed forces. This is usually an unstated reality of the raison d’etre of the huge industrial-military complexes of the world, bit occasionally someone will state the unmentionable truth. Trust Capita.

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